But once more, if we are dealing with _The Memoirs of David
Balfour_--if we bear steadily in mind that David Balfour is our
concern--not James Stewart--the disappointment is far more easily
forgiven. Then, and then only, we get the right perspective of
David's attempt, and recognize how inevitable was the issue when this
stripling engaged to turn back the great forces of history.

It is more than a lustre, as the Dedication reminds us, since David
Balfour, at the end of the last chapter of _Kidnapped_, was left to
kick his heels in the British Linen Company's office. Five years have
a knack of making people five years older; and the wordy, politic
intrigue of _Catriona_ is at least five years older than the
rough-and-tumble intrigue of _Kidnapped_; of the fashion of the
_Vicomte de Bragelonne_ rather than of the _Three Musketeers_. But
this is as it should be; for older and astuter heads are now mixed up
in the case, and Preston-grange is a graduate in a very much higher
school of diplomacy than was Ebenezer Balfour. And if no word was said
in _Kidnapped_ of the love of women, we know now that this matter was
held over until the time came for it to take its due place in David
Balfour's experience. Everyone knew that Mr. Stevenson would draw a
woman beautifully as soon as he was minded. Catriona and her situation
have their foreshadowing in _The Pavilion on the Links_. But for all
that she is a surprise. She begins to be a surprise--a beautiful
surprise--when in Chapter X. she kisses David's hand "with a higher
passion than the common kind of clay has any sense of;" and she is a
beautiful surprise to the end of the book. The loves of these two make
a moving story--old, yet not old: and I pity the heart that is not
tender for Catriona when she and David take their last walk together
in Leyden, and "the knocking of her little shoes upon the way sounded
extraordinarily pretty and sad."

* * * * *

Nov. 3, 1894. "The Ebb Tide."

A certain Oxford lecturer, whose audience demurred to some trivial
mistranslation from the Greek, remarked: "I perceive, gentlemen, that
you have been taking a mean advantage of me. You have been looking it
out in the Lexicon."

The pleasant art of reasoning about literature on internal evidence
suffers constant discouragement from the presence and activity of
those little people who insist upon "looking it out in the Lexicon."
Their brutal methods will upset in